Nora Jane (18 page)

“We’ll be finished in a week or ten days. It can’t drag on much longer than that. You think we ought to send for him?”

“She can bring him. I’ll tell her in the morning. I’ll line up a sitter and he can go back to the Montessori school in the
mornings. I knew better than to do this.”

“How’d he fall in a pool?’

“Mother’s neighbors left the gate open or something. The police came. He’s fine. Nothing happened to him. It’s just Mother’s
insanity.”

Then Sandy George Wade, who was the father of Lydia Harwood, as anyone who looked at them would immediately know, began to
flip channels on the television set, hoping to find a commercial starring either Claudine or himself, as that always cheered
him up and made him think he wouldn’t end up in a poor folks home. He reached for Claudine, to believe she was there, and
sighed deep inside his scarred, motherless, fatherless heart. His main desire was to get a good night’s sleep so he would
be beautiful for the cameras in the morning.

Claudine pulled away from him. She got up and went into the other room to call her mother back. When she returned she had
a different plan. “We have to go to San Francisco and pick him up. She won’t bring him. Well, to hell with it. She wants me
to meet the woman who pulled him out of the pool. I probably ought to sue them for having an attractive nuisance. Anyway,
we have to go. Will you take me?”

“Of course I will. As soon as we have a break. Come on, get in bed. I like San Francisco. It’s a nice drive. We’ll take the
BMW. It’s driving good since I got the new tires. Get in bed. Let’s get some sleep.” Then Claudine gave up for the day and
climbed into the bed and let Sandy cuddle up to her. Their neuroses fit like gloves. They were really very happy together.
They hated the same things. They liked to make love to each other and they liked to sleep in the same bed. It was the best
thing either of them had ever known. They even liked Zandia. Neither one of them liked to take care of him but they didn’t
hate or resent him. Sometimes they even thought he was funny.

S
O WHY WAS I CHOSEN
for this? That’s what I keep asking myself. It’s like a tear in the fabric of reality. Maybe I heard him walking by the window.
I have a perfect ear for music. Well, I do. Maybe I saw him by the fence and knew he’d be wanting to get to the pool. All
mothers are wary of pools. I’ve been watching to make sure no one drowns in our pool for years. Maybe there’s a logical explanation.
I’m sure there is. It only seems like a miracle.” Nora Jane was talking. She and Freddy and Freddy’s best friend, Nieman Gluuk,
were at Chez Panisse having lunch. Nora Jane was wearing yellow. Freddy had on his plaid shirt and chinos. Nieman wore his
suit. It was the first time the Harwoods had been out in public since the night Nora Jane pulled the child from the swimming
pool. Nieman had been with them almost constantly since the event. Actually he had been with them almost constantly since
they were married ten years before. Nieman and Freddy saw each other or talked on the phone nearly every day. They had done
this since they were five years old. No one thought anything about it or ever said it was strange that two grown men were
inseparable.

“Three knights were allowed to see the Grail,” Freddy said. “Bors and Percival and Galahad. They were pure of heart. You’re
pure of heart, Nora Jane. And besides, you’re an intuitive. The first time Nieman met you he told me that. He says you’re
the most intuitive person he’s ever known.”

“Maybe this means I shouldn’t go to college. It means something, Freddy. Something big.”

“You think I don’t know that? I was there too, wasn’t I? I watched it happen. What it means is that there’s a lot more going
on than we are able to acknowledge. Thought is energy. It creates fields. You picked up on one. You’re a good receiver. That’s
what intuitive means. Maybe I’ll go to school with you. Just dive right into a freshman science course and see if I sink or
swim.”

Nieman sighed and shook his head from side to side. “I can’t believe you had this experience just when you were getting ready
to try your wings at Berkeley. It’s a coincidence, not a warning. It doesn’t mean the girls are in danger or that we are in
danger. No, listen to me. I know you think that but you shouldn’t. The point is that you saved his life, not that his life
was in danger. You will always save lives in many ways. It’s all the more reason to go back to school and gain more knowledge
and more power. Knowledge is power, even if it does sound trite to say it.”

“I wish they hadn’t put it in the papers.” Nora Jane turned to Nieman and touched his hand. She was one of the three people
in the world who dared to touch the esteemed and feared Nieman Gluuk, the bitter and hilarious movie critic of the
San Francisco Chronicle.
“The whole thing only lasted about six minutes. I can barely remember any of it except the moment I knew to do it. Freddy
remembers pulling him out better than I do.”

“We must never forget it,” Nieman said.

“A man who had it happen to him last year called last night. He went through a glass door to get to a pool and saved his nephew.
He thinks it has something to do with water. Water as a conductor.”

“It proves a lot of theories,” Freddy added. “I was there too, Nieman. I witnessed it. I was in bed with her.”

“Excuse me.” They were interrupted by a waiter, who took their orders for goat cheese pie and salads and wine. “It was the
single most profound thing that ever happened to me in my life,” Freddy went on. “I will be thinking about it every day for
the rest of my life. A tear in the cover, a glimpse of a wild, or perhaps exquisitely orderly, reality that is lost to us
most of the time. Think of it, Nieman. The brain can’t stand to consciously process all it senses and knows. We’d go crazy.
The brain is a filter and its first job is to keep the body healthy. Occasionally, perhaps by accident, it sees a larger reality
as its domain. Altruism. Well, it’s so humbling to be part of it.” He looked down, afraid they would think he wanted them
to remember what he had done in the earthquake of 1986. But they knew better. He had forbidden his friends ever to speak of
that. “Well, let’s don’t talk it all away. It’s Nora Jane’s miracle. I want to take her up to Willits for a while to think
it over but she can’t go. She starts school in three days, you know.”

The waiter put bread down in front of them, the best French bread this side of New Orleans. Nieman held out a loaf to Nora
Jane and they broke the bread. They ate in silence for a while.

“Fantastic about Berkeley,” Nieman said at last. “Brilliant. I wish I could go. I feel like a dinosaur with my old knowledge.
My encyclopedia is twenty years old. Every year I say I’ll get another one but I never do.”

The waiter brought more bread. Nieman buttered a piece and examined it, calculating the fat grams and wondering if it mattered.
“Our darling Nora Jane,” he went on. “Loose on the campus in the directionless nineties. I should write a modern opera for
you. The problem is the ending. Shakespeare knew what to do. He poured in outrageous action, tied up all the loose ends, piled
up some bodies, and danced off the stage on the wings of language. Ah, those epilogues. ‘As you from crimes would pardoned
be. Let your indulgence set me free.’ Oh, he could lift the language! The modern stage can’t bear the weight of so much beauty,
so much fun. It’s too large an insult to the modern fantasy, boredom, and self-pity. I went to three movies last week that
were so bad I didn’t last for the first hour. I just walked out. They began hopefully enough, were well acted by fine actors,
then you could see the money mold begin to grow, the meetings where the money people in group think begin to decide how to
corrupt the script. Well, let’s not ruin lunch with such thoughts. After lunch shall we go over to the campus and walk around
and get you accustomed to your new domain, Miss Nora? I heard the brilliant translator Mark Musa is here for the semester
to teach The
Divine Comedy
. You might want to take that. We could go by and see if he’s in his office and introduce ourselves.”

“There you go,” Freddy said. “Trying to take over what she takes. I pray to God every day to make me stop caring what classes
she takes.”

“The only answer is for you to go to school with me,” Nora Jane said. “You too, Nieman. Why not? Life is short, as you both
tell me a thousand times a month.”

“Life is short,” Nieman agreed. “We could do it, Freddy. We could think of it as a donation to the university. Pay tuition
as special students, sign up for classes, and go as often as we are able. I could take Monday and Tuesday off. I’m going to
list the names of seven movies and then leave a blank white space. Think of us back on the campus, Freddy. Freddy was valedictorian
of our class, Nora. But you know that.”

“His mother’s told me a million times. I think it was the high point of her life.”

“That’s what she wants you to think. The high point of her life was when she flew that jet to Seattle in the air show. No,
I guess it was when she played Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
You know who she’s going out with now, don’t you, Nieman?”

“I heard. It’s a terrible shadow, Freddy, but you have survived so far. Well, shall we do it then? Register for classes?”

“Yes. I’m taking biology, physics, and a history course. I want to see what they’re teaching. It can’t be as bad as I’ve heard
it is.”

“I’ll take Musa’s Dante in Translation and a playwriting course. I’ll go incognito and write the play for Nora Jane and we’ll
put it on next year as an AIDS benefit.”

“I’ll sing ‘Vissi d’arte’ from the side of the stage while twelve little girls in long white dresses run around the stage
doing leaps. Would that be a conclusion? Then a poet can run out on the stage and read part of ‘Little Gidding.’ Imagine us
all going to college together.”

“Meeting for coffee at Aranga’s. When I was a student I was touched by old people going back to school. We will touch their
silly little hearts. At least, Freddy and I will. You’ll drive them crazy. I don’t know, Freddy, maybe she’s overeducated
already.”

“I want a degree. I’m embarrassed not to have a college degree. I’m the first person in my family in three generations not
to have one.” She sat up very straight and tall and Nieman and Freddy understood this was not to be taken lightly.

“Then let’s go,” Freddy said. “If you will allow us, we will accompany you on this pilgrimage.” She turned her head to look
at him and he fell madly in love with the sweep and whiteness of her neck and Nieman watched this approvingly. After all,
someone has to be in love and get married and continue the human race.

An hour later they were on the Berkeley campus, walking along the sidewalks where Freddy and Nieman had walked when they were
young. Nora Jane had been on the campus many times but never as a student. It was very strange, very liberating, and she felt
her spirit open to the world she was about to enter. “I’ll be Virgil and you be Dante and Nora Jane can be Beatrice,” Nieman
was saying. “The possibility of vast fields of awareness, that’s what this campus always says to me. I used to think I could
get vibrations from the physics building when the first reactor was installed and all those brilliant minds were here. I used
to feel the force of them would dissolve the harm my mother did to me each morning. She would pour fear and anxiety over me
and I would step onto the campus and feel it eaten up by knowledge. She was enraged that I was studying theater. She was very
hard on me.”

“You had to live at home with her?” Nora Jane took his arm to protect him from the past.

“She wanted me to go to medical school and be a psychiatrist, as she was seeing one. I would say to her, Mother, theater is
psychotherapy writ large. The actors on the stage do what people do in ordinary life, keep secrets, say half of what they’re
thinking, manipulate, lie. Because it’s writ large on the stage or screen the audience is on to them. They leave the theater
and go out into the world more aware of other people’s behaviors, if not of their own. Still, she was not convinced. She still
thinks what I do is frivolous.”

“She can’t, after all these years?”

“Can she not? I’m an only child, don’t forget that.”

“I am too and so is Freddy. We’re the only-child league. Like the redheaded league in Sherlock Holmes.”

They linked arms, coming down the wide sidewalk to the student union. “This is like
The Wizard of Oz,”
Nieman said. “In The
Divine Comedy
they walked single file.”

“Well, these are not the legions of the damned either,” Freddy added, “although they certainly look the part.” They were passing
students, some with rings in their ears and noses and lips and some wearing chic outfits and some looking like they were only
there because they didn’t have anything better to do.

“Let’s go to the registrar’s office and get that over with,” Freddy suggested.

“I will fill out any number of forms but I am not sending off for transcripts,” Nieman decreed. “If they start any funny stuff
about transcripts I’ll drop my disguise and call the president of the university.”

“We aren’t pulling rank, Nieman,” Freddy said. “We go as pilgrims or not at all.”

“You go your way and I’ll go mine, as always. Yes, it’s beginning to feel like old times.”

“Don’t talk about the sixties or I’ll hit you,” Nora Jane said. “I was in a convent school kneeling in the gravel before the
statue of the Virgin and you were here getting to read literature and hear lectures by physicists. It isn’t fair. You’re too
far ahead. I’ll never catch up.”

“No competition please. We’re in this together.”

By five that afternoon it was done. Freddy was signed up to audit World History and Physics I and Biology I. Nieman was taking
Dante and had met Mark Musa and promised to brush up on his Italian and Nora Jane had her books and notebooks for English,
History, Algebra, and Introduction to Science. They had sacks of books from Freddy’s bookstore and the campus bookstore.